Living Las Vegas

At Home in the City of Lights

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Top Vegas Hotels: Bellagio, Luxor, Rio

Roads from the Ashes: An Odyssey in Real Life on the Virtual Frontier, by Megan Edwards

Vegas in the News

Buffalo Jim Won’t Come Out Tonight

News of the death of James “Buffalo Jim” Barrier first came to me by email. I’ve long been a subscriber to former Las Vegas City Councilman Steve Miller’s e-zine, a rambling missive he sends out to what I imagine is an enormous mailing list whenever he has news or opinions about one of his pet topics…

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The Elfman Cometh

The Las Vegas Review-Journal has been part of my morning ritual since I moved here. Early on, I noticed that the music reviews by Doug Elfman were always excellent. Not only did the guy write with a fluid pen, he said stuff that was worth paying attention to. And in addition to posting brilliantly creative negative opinions, his accolades were marvelous, too. It’s rare that a reviewer is equally gifted at panning and raving, but Elfman had the knack…

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Standing on the Corner, Watching All the ‘Bots Go By

For the third time in four years, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held a robot race and invited the public to come and watch the spectacle. This time, the event was billed as the “Urban Challenge,” because, unlike the first two events, which were held in the howling desert, this contest required the ‘bots to navigate city streets and interact with traffic. They even had to share the road with each other, something the organizers claimed had never happened on earth before…

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City As Predator

An article about Las Vegas appeared in today’s New York Times. Online, the story is available only to those who subscribe to “Times Select,” but that didn’t prevent its immediate appearance in toto on a numbers of blogs (like this one). I received the story by email last night. My first thought after reading “City as Predator” was that it was another annoying rant against Las Vegas by a parachute journalist on an expense account…

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Days of Wine and Mobsters

Las Vegas is in love with its mobsters. Even though anyone who has ever read the slightest tidbit of Las Vegas history knows that Bugsy Siegel didn’t found the place, he gets the credit. And not only that, he gets the glory and romance. The most commonly repeated cliché in Vegasland is, “Things were so much better when the mob ran this place.” …

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